


Mulch

by Sheffield



Category: Sherlock (TV), The World's End (2013)
Genre: Crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-31
Updated: 2013-07-31
Packaged: 2017-12-22 00:26:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/906746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sheffield/pseuds/Sheffield
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Mycroft Holmes rings his brother with the codeword for "zombie apocalypse" Sherlock is rather offended.  An invasion of alien robot simulacra is *not the same thing at all*</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mulch

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is a crossover with the 2013 film "The World's End" and so is spoilery for the film. Please don't read this if you plan to see the film but haven't done so yet! If you don't plan to see the film at all but can't work out what's happening, there are some explanatory notes about the film at the end.

The phone rang, and Mycroft’s voice said “Mr Antrobus is coming.”  
“Mr Antrobus?” Sherlock sneered. “That’s the code word for ‘zombie apocalypse’, isn’t it? I hardly think there’s a zombie apocalypse in the offing, Mycroft. Try again.”  
“Run, Sherlock. Now.” Mycroft said quietly, and rang off.

Zombie apocalypse seemed unlikely. Surely there would have been signs, he would have deduced it; he wouldn’t have been left waiting on Secret Squirrel signals from Mycroft and his minions. And the correct response to a zombie apocalypse was to fort up and fend them off, not “run”. 

On the other hand… where was John?

Sherlock texted. “Come home at once. Zombie apocalypse, according to Mycroft. SH”

After a couple of moment’s thought, he sent a second text to a pre-prepared list of correspondents – Lestrade, self-evidently, then those of the homeless network who had mobiles, and finally random other people who had impinged on his consciousness, the Mollys and Stamfords and Henrys of this world. “Warning: something bad is happening. Go to a safe place at once.”

There. That should please John. He liked it when Sherlock showed concern for people outside of their little ménage.

“MRS HUDSON!!!!” he yelled.  
She appeared at the door almost instantly.  
“Yes dear. What can I do for you? Would you like some tea?”

Hmmm. He had expected her to say “not your housekeeper, dear,” and to have required approximately two and a half minutes of persuasion to pack up and move in to 221B, plus a further thirty-eight seconds of unnecessary conversation before she started tea making.

Her brow was improbably smooth and her hair appeared to have become a few shades blonder and less grey.

“How’s your hip?” he said.  
“Oh it’s fine, dear. Ever so nice, as a matter of fact. I ran up these stairs like nobody’s business just now. You’ll see, Sherlock.”

She came towards him with her hand out, palm facing him, as if she was planning on impressing her palmprint on his cheekbones, and he backed away.

“Don’t fight, Sherlock. You’ll be much happier, honestly.”

He groped wildly behind him for something to fend her off with and found his samurai sword conveniently to hand behind the sofa cushions. He lopped off her arm, and then watched, fascinated, as the arm thrashed towards him in a pincer movement as Mrs Hudson herself approached round the other side of the armchair. There was rather a lot of blue blood, too.

Curious, he thought, lopping off her head; you would have expected Mycroft to have had a code for “invasion of body-snatching alien robots”. A zombie apocalypse would have required quite a different response.

He lopped off Mrs Hudson’s remaining arm and then, as she continued to kick, both legs. He bundled the dismembered Mrs Hudson robot pieces together in the carpet, rolling it up and taping it together so the detached arms and legs would finally stop trying to bash his brains out. “Oh Sherlock!” Mrs Hudson’s head said from where he had carefully placed it on the mantelpiece. She sounded quite unnecessarily reproachful, under the circumstances.

“Do be quiet,” he said.

The thing was, it was clearly a robot simulacrum – a replacement FOR Mrs Hudson, not a conversion or invasion OF Mrs Hudson. So where was the actual Mrs Hudson?

“Problem?” John said.

Sherlock looked up at his flatmate and realised, with a sinking feeling, that there might be more of a problem than Mycroft had let on.

“No, nothing much,” he said airily. “Mrs Hudson appears to have been replaced by an alien robot with blue blood, and Mycroft calls with the codeword for *zombie apocalypse*. I mean, really. The two states are quite different and distinct.”  
“Well quite,” John agreed quickly. “No-one stumbled towards me asking for BRAIIIIINZZZZ the whole way here.”

He was moving rather well.

“Show me your scar,” Sherlock said.  
“My-”  
“For SCIENCE,” Sherlock added distinctly.  
“Oh, well, if it’s for SCIENCE-”

The John simulacrum had a smooth, unscarred shoulder, and then another one just the same. Oh, and a sarcastic sense of humour just like the REAL John, it seemed.

“What happens to the real ones, when you replace them?” Sherlock asked the disembodied heads of John and Mrs Hudson. They would make quite good bookends, he thought distantly.

“Oh, you know. Recycling, really. They go to the depot; they’re chipped and mulched, and eventually when they’re dried out they make a rather good organic fertilizer. It’s for the best, really,” Mrs Hudson’s head reassured him. John’s head just waggled its eyebrows knowingly, and then the decapitated body blindsided him and hit him with...

Well, that didn’t really matter. Anyone could keep an inflatable sheep in the fireplace, and lucky he had, or the robot might have thought to hit him with the poker. The fact was, he was on the floor semi conscious and his flatmate’s homicidal headless robot simulacrum was trying to strangle him with a pair of rubber gloves it appeared to have produced out of the ether. Oh, no, actually, that had been what he’d been using to protect his hands FROM the ether, while he conducted that experiment with the toes and the pond mould.

Anyway, he snatched the gloves and threw them into the fireplace and the John robot staggered to its feet and groped for its head on the mantlepiece, replaced it, sniggered, and then took it off and put it back the right way round, and then turned to Sherlock.

“Right then,” it said, holding out its palm towards him. “This won’t hurt, Sherlock, honestly. And I should know.”  
“He’s right you know,” Mrs Hudson’s head agreed cheerfully.

Sherlock poked a finger in John’s eye, tore a hole, and simply ripped the top half of his head off. Which turned out to be hollow anyway, leaving him with a jagged bowl for a head, ending at around nose level. And *still talking*.

He lopped its arms and legs off as a precautionary measure and taped them up in a bundle with the torso as he’d done with the Mrs Hudson.

***

“Sherlock! I’ve got a papier mache HEAD!”  
“Problem?”  
John, newly liberated from the mulching machine, dressed fetchingly in a John Innes Potting Compost sack and with, for some inexplicable reason, a flowerpot on his head, appeared to dislike sharing his living space with a poorly-mended robot simulacrum.

“We can hardly let Mycroft and his minions send them to be melted down, John! Any more than I could let them send you and Mrs Hudson to be mulched. They’re you, after all. And Mrs Hudson. Obviously.”  
“Obviously.”

John seemed at first to have a problem with a younger, unscarred version of himself (well, unscarred except for the slight problem of half its head being a rather badly constructed papier mache ball. But at least that would make them easy to tell apart.)

However the John robot seemed to be quite contented making tea and hoovering under the sofa, and, now that Mycroft had broadcast the relevant codes on the relevant alien robot frequency, hardly homicidal at all.

“No. Obviously. Carry on, then.”  
“Not your housekeeper,” the robot John said, a trifle tartly under the circumstances.  
Sherlock raised an eyebrow at it.  
“Yes, Master.”

John - the real, wonderful, scarred, unrobot John - started to giggle.

**Author's Note:**

> Probably entirely unnecessary notes on The World's End: five school friends reunite in their forties to complete a drinking challenge they attempted on their last day of school. They find their old home town is just the same but different because most of the population has been replaced by robot simulacra as part of an alien invasion of the Earth. One of the characters is played by Martin Freeman; his character is replaced by a robot and the robot is damaged by having the top of its head ripped off. At the end of the film the robot is happily living his life, with its head "finished" with papier mache. 
> 
> You should particularly note that: the robots appear to have hollow heads. Their limbs move independently after removal. They "bleed" copious amounts of blue fluid. And they can be ripped apart really quiet easily!


End file.
